Construction drawings released: Flight 93 crescent now

Alec Rawls exposes continued Park Service posturing about the design of the Flight 93 monument. Our federal government continues to suffer from a severe truth defecit. 

	If they truly intended to memorialize the heroic passengers who tried to preserve their lives against certain death and prevent an exacerbated national disaster in our nation's capitol, it could be done simply and less expensively.  

	A retired 757 or similar fusilage, parked at the crash site, oriented along the flight path could serve as a theatre for showing the Flight 93 movie. I can not imagine a better monument. Let's roll!

From Error Theory: The original Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 faced less than 2° from Mecca. That made it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed-arch shaped, but the classic mihrab is crescent shaped.) The Park Service dismissed concern about the Mecca-oriented crescent on grounds that the construction drawings had not yet been finalized. “Those trees could move fifty feet, or three hundred feet,” said Project Manager Jeff Reinbold in the Spring of 2006, as if this kind of “tweaking” would make any difference (Crescent of Betrayal Ch.8 p.145-6). The construction drawings have now been released, and yes, they moved the lower tip of the half-mile wide crescent about 300 feet, enough to change the orientation of the crescent by about 4.5°. Instead of pointing less than 2° north of Mecca, the giant Islamic-shaped crescent now points less than 3° south of Mecca. Here is the original Crescent of Embrace: “Qibla” is the direction to Mecca, which you can verify using any online Mecca-direction calculator (just type in Somerset PA). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) would be facing 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°. Here is one of the new construction drawings: Instead of facing a titch north of Mecca, the giant crescent now faces a titch south of Mecca (2.7° south ± 0.1°). As with the original Crescent design, the upper crescent tip is the end of the 50’ tall Entry Portal Wall and the lower crescent tip is the last of the 50’ tall Maple trees on the bottom. The landscape overlays make the details hard to see in the thumbnail image above, but at full resolution they are fully legible. (Copy of source PDF, without the superimposed orientations lines here. Large file warning. Graphic is on p. 30 of 233.) The Park Service was SUPPOSED to remove the Islamic symbol shapes When architect Paul Murdoch’s winning Crescent of Embrace design was announced in September 2005, it appeared to show a bare naked Islamic crescent and star-flag planted atop the crash site: Burned by the resulting firestorm of protest, the Park Service to agreed to get rid of the Islamic symbol shapes, but they never did. They added an extra arc of trees, and they call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent. This is explained on the Park Service’s own website. The extra arc of trees is explicitly described as a broken off part of the circle:

In summary, the memorial is shaped in a circular fashion, and the circle is symbolically “broken” or missing trees in two places, depicting the flight path of the plane, and the crash site.

Those two breaks are the two ends of the extra arc of trees: The extra arc of trees extends from blue circle to blue circle, marking the two “breaks” in the circle referred to in the Park Service’s official explanation of the broken-circle design. One is where the flight path breaks the circle (left), the other is near the crash site (center). What is symbolically left standing (the unbroken part of the circle) is just this: Remove the symbolically broken off parts, and you get the original Crescent of Embrace design. The only change is that the crescent has now been rotated clockwise a few degrees. In the construction plans it faces slightly south of Mecca instead of slightly north of Mecca. For a parallel, imagine airline security discovering a terror bomber, then playing with the fit his suicide vest before escorting him to his plane. They said they were going to remove the giant crescent. They claim they HAVE removed it, but they haven’t. Symbolically, the design remains completely unchanged. The terrorists are still depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca. The giant crescent is actually a mihrab Here is the mihrab at the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just like the crescent memorial to Flight 93: Confronted with evidence that the Crescent of Embrace is actually designed to be the world’s largest mosque, the Park Service sought advice from a pair of Muslim scholars. Both acknowledged the almost exact Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent and both offered overtly dishonest excuses for it. One said not to worry about the likeness to an Islamic mihrab because no one has ever seen a mihrab this BIG before:

…most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience.

Right. That’s why everybody scratches their head at Mt. Rushmore. No one has ever seen Abraham Lincoln so BIG before. They just can’t figure it out. To be fooled by this excuse, you have to really really want to be fooled. The other Muslim scholar said not to worry, the crescent cannot be seen as mihrab unless it points exactly at the Kaaba:

Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

In fact, a mihrab does NOT have to point exactly at Mecca, for the simple reason that, throughout most of Islamic history, Muslims in far-flung parts of the world had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. As a result, it was established as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca. This was recently affirmed by Saudi religious authorities, after Meccans realized that even most of their local mosques do not face directly towards the Kaaba. “It does not affect the prayers” assured the Islamic Affairs Ministry. Faced with evidence of an Islamic plot, why would the Park Service send this evidence exclusively to Muslims for appraisal? Have they forgotten who attacked us on 9/11? The Service has long since been apprised of the patent dishonesties retailed by its two Muslim advisors but they don’t care. They wanted to be lied to, they knew where to go to be lied to, and they got what they wanted.

Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey

So where are the patriotic stalwarts like Michelle Malkin whose objections were instrumental in getting the Park Service to agree to remove the Islamic symbol shapes in the first place? If they knew in 2005 that the symbolic outcome of 9/11 should not be a giant Islamic shaped crescent why are they silent about this exact same symbolism today, after THEY were promised that this perversion would be removed? Ed Morrissey urged his readers “to tell the National Parks Service and the Secretary of the Interior to rethink their plans,” promising for his own part that “as long as that crescent remains in the design, I’m not donating a red cent to the memorial.” Well Ed, the crescent does remain in the design, so please rejoin the fight. The desertion of Malkin et. al. makes a difficult gap to fill, but we had better fill it, or the Flight 93 crash-site will soon be home to the world’s largest mosque. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.

Memorial Project still helping the hijacker fix his

http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2009/07/memorial-project-still-helping-hijacker.html
Memorial Project still helping the hijacker fix his disguise After denying for 4 years that the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 will contain 44 inscribed memorial panels (equaling the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists) the Memorial Project has announced a new design that appears to collapse three of the panels into one: Artist’s depiction of the slightly altered design for the Sacred Ground Plaza. [If you are a newcomer, the Plaza sits in the position of the star on architect Paul Murdoch’s giant Islamic crescent and star flag. They call the giant crescent a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle–what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11–is completely unchanged. It is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.] The focus of the Plaza is the two part Memorial Wall that follows the path of Flight 93 down to the crash site. As before, the lower section of wall contains 40 memorial panels, inscribed with the names of the 40 heroes. Instead of being small translucent panels set into the wall, they will now be 8 foot tall slabs. Nice. The symbolically significant change is in the separate upper section of Memorial Wall that will be inscribed with the 9/11 date. In the original design, this separate upper section of wall contained three additional inscribed memorial panels: Elevation view from original Sacred Ground Plaza design PDF. The wall on the left is designated: “WALL WITH INSCRIBED NAMES ON FOLDED BAND OF TRANSLUCENT MARBLE.” The opening between the two sections of wall is marked “TRAIL,” and the wall on the right is designated: “WALL WITH INSCRIBED DATE.” The three translucent panels inscribed with the 9/11 date were a problem because further up the flight path, at the upper crescent tip (where Flight 93 symbolically breaks the circle, turning it into the giant Islamic shaped crescent), sits one more inscribed translucent memorial panel: At the end of the Entry Portal Walkway sits a huge glass panel that dedicates the entire site. In the original design, this brought the total number of inscribed translucent memorial panels on the flight path to 44, with the number of “extra” blocks matching the number of Islamic hijackers on Flight 93. The enabling legislation for the Flight 93 Memorial specifically bars the Park Service from memorializing the enemy, but architect Paul Murdoch has other ideas. He doesn’t just include them in some kind of can’t-we-all-just-get-along multiculturalist fantasy. He depicts them as triumphant warriors, placing the capstone of his terrorist memorializing block count at the exact point where, in Murdoch’s description, the terrorists’ circle-breaking, crescent-creating feat is achieved. They explode through our peaceful circle, then die along with their victims. The capstone block commemorating this glorious martyrdom will be inscribed: “A field of honor forever.” The Memorial Project is okay with all of this, but thanks to our blogbursts, too many people OUTSIDE of the Project also know about the terrorist memorializing block count, so they decided to fix up architect Paul Murdoch’s disguise, telling a caller two years ago that they were going to turn the three panels with the 9/11 date into one large panel. That would change the memorial block count from 44 to 42. Here is Mountain Goat’s report on that 2007 phone call:

The gentleman did add, that the translucent blocks are actually white marble, and that the one with Sept. 11 inscribed on it will be one block, although it will be roughly the length three of the other blocks would have been.

This seems to be the change that is depicted in the new design image, though we will have to see the construction drawings to be sure. (An FOIA request for the recently completed construction drawings was submitted to the Park Service earlier this month.) Primping Murdoch’s disguise does not stop his terrorist-memorializing plot, but only helps him to get away with itThe Park Service assumes that the 44 blocks were a coincidence and that by eliminating the coincidence it has eliminated the problem, but the 44 blocks were not a coincidence and changing the number of blocks to 42 does nothing alter the terrorist memorializing intent. Also, because the Park Service has been trying NOT to see Murdoch is up to, they left other terrorist memorializing features of the inscribed panels completely intact. Notice, for instance, that the separate upper section of memorial wall, inscribed with the 9/11 date, is centered on the centerline of the giant crescent: The trail that divides the Memorial Wall into two parts is marked in purple. The section of wall with the 9/11 date is marked in aqua. You can see just by looking that the upper section of wall is centered on the center line of the crescent. That is the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag. Thus the 9/11 date goes to the star on the Islamic flag. The date goes to the terrorists. Changing the number of panels used to inscribe the 9/11 date does nothing to alter this terrorist memorializing feature. Not that Murdoch really cares whether the Park Service executes his design with proper Islamic precision. To Murdoch, it is the plan that mattersMurdoch made clear from the beginning that it is the plan that matters, not whether the memorial is actually built exactly to his specifications. We can tell that he fully expected at least one of his terrorist memorializing features to be caught and stopped because he left provision for his “mistake” to be easily corrected. This was the so called “40 Memorial Groves.” There were supposed to be one for each of the 40 infidel heroes, but Murdoch’s site-plan only shows 38 groves: Why 38? Try to figure it out for yourself, then look here. As usual, Murdoch provides multiply redundant proof of intent, once you figure out what he is up to. Notice that Murdoch left room for two more Memorial Groves, one at each end. But just as the 38 Groves “mistake” is easy to fix, it will also be easy to un-fix it later. Indeed, failure to follow Murdoch’s exact design is not a bug. It is a feature. Islamic fundamentalists have been citing control of the al-Aqsa mosque as a grounds for waging war against Israel since the founding of the modern Jewish state. If we fail to be true to the glorious design of Murdoch’s terrorist memorial mosque, that will just be one more reason for Murdoch’s co-religionists to conquer The Great Satan, so that this death-penalty insult can first be avenged (“It is not for any prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land” 8.67), then corrected. Murdoch has not admitted to being Muslim (never mind a fundamentalist Muslim), but he HAS demonstrably designed an al Qaeda sympathizing memorial to Flight 93, all according to the established principles of proper mosque design (chapter 5), so there is no doubt of his ambition. Anyone who tries to sneak an al Qaeda memorial onto the Flight 93 crash site IS al Qaeda. In 2005, the Park Service helped Murdoch hide his giant crescent by calling it a broken circle instead (as Murdoch had described it all along). Now the Park Service is helping to disguise yet another of Murdoch’s terrorist memorializing design features, but without even acknowledging this time that the changes are in response to anything troublesome about the original design. So tell us Park Service: if there never were 44 memorial panels on the flight path, as you have been telling the press for almost four years, why did you change the number of panels? And do you really think it is wise to help a hijacker improve his disguise? To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.

Two Flight 93 Memorial Commissioners Quit in Protest

http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-memorial-project-commission-members.html
Two Pennsylvanian’s quit the Flight 93 Memorial Commission last week, protesting Park Service plans to condemn five crash-site properties that it never negotiated for in good faith. Consider the case of the Lambert family, who have been on their land for three generations:

“It’s absolutely a surprise. I’m shocked by it. I’m disappointed by it,” said Tim Lambert, who owns nearly 164 acres that his grandfather bought in the 1930s. The park service plans to condemn two parcels totaling about five acres — land, he said, he had always intended to donate for the memorial. “To the best of my knowledge and my lawyer, absolutely no negotiations have taken place with the park service where we’ve sat down and discussed this,” Lambert said. Lambert said he had mainly dealt with the Families of Flight 93 and said he’s provided the group all the information it’s asked for, including an appraisal.

They are condemning land that he was trying to GIVE to them, just because he had the gall to expect the Park Service to actually do its part. Project members have embraced the “absolute moral authority” conceit How dare anyone not rush to give these grieving 9/11 family members whatever they want? Didn’t they hear Maureen Dowd’s proclamation that “the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq [or on 9/11] is absolute”? When crash-site owner Mike Svonavec put up a donation box to try to cover some of the cost of hiring security guards for the hugely popular Temporary Memorial, Patrick White, cousin of Flight 93 hero Louis Nacke, told the press:

That land has been paid for with 40 lives … the donation box is an insult to that cost.

When Svonavec insisted that the Park Service follow its own legally required procedures for assessing property values (procedures that, as it happens, take into account current property values, not just pre-crash property values), White accused Svonavec of trying to profit from the blood of his cousin:

“I think Svonavec believes his land, because it has the blood of my cousin and 39 other people, it’s worth more,” he said.

Using the flag of victim-hood to defend Paul Murdoch’s terrorist memorial mosque Project members use the same trick to deflect criticism of the giant Islamic-shaped crescent that is now being built on the crash-site. When people point out the hidden terrorist memorializing features—things that no one knew about when the Crescent of Embrace design was chosen—like the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, or the 44 glass blocks emplaced along the flight path, Project members not only deny these easy to verify facts, but they pretend that they are being accused of intending to honor the terrorists:

“That’s an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as fact,” said Edward Felt’s brother, Gordon Felt [about the 44 blocks claim]. He says he is insulted people would believe he would participate in anything that honored his brother’s killers.

In The Church of Liberalism, Ann Coulter slammed the media for granting the Jersey Girls an “absolute moral authority” card, not questioning the Girls’ practice of blaming the Bush administration instead of al Qaeda for their husband’s deaths on 9/11. The Jersey Girls were bad enough, but nowhere is the flag of victim-hood being used to cover up more bad behavior than at the Memorial Project. Active cover-up of an ongoing Islamic supremacist plot Like the Jersey Girls, the Memorial Project gives Islam a pass for 9/11. Project members might not have known about the Mecca-orientation of the Crescent of Embrace, but they DID know that it was a giant Islamic-shaped crescent. Now they are doing far worse. Now they DO know that the giant crescent points almost exactly at Mecca, and are consistently misleading the press about it. Their own Muslim consultant told them not to worry about the Mecca-oriented crescent, claiming that it can’t be seen as a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built) unless it points EXACTLY at Mecca (a claim that was contradicted earlier this month by Saudi religious authorities). So what does Project Supervisor Joanne Hanley say when asked about the Mecca-orientation claim?

The only thing that orients the memorial is the crash site.

They are actively and knowingly covering up clear evidence of an ongoing al Qaeda sympathizing plot. Bad behavior indeed. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.

Park Service Deception Exposed

http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2009/05/saudi-authorities-contradict-us-park .html P.S. Am trying a handmade version of the blogroll this time so it won’t take up so much room. Saudi authorities contradict U.S. Park Service: mihrabs do NOT have to point exactly at Mecca A Muslim consultant told the Park Service in 2006 that the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 cannot be seen as a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), because the giant Islamic-shaped crescent does not point exactly at Mecca:

Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

Saudi religious authorities recently had to address this question when observers noted that some 200 mosques in Mecca itself do not point directly at the Kaaba (the “Sacred Mosque” that all Muslims are supposed to face for prayer). Meccans who worried that their prayers might not count were assured by the Islamic Affairs Ministry that “it does not affect the prayers.” The necessity for such a rule is obvious. Throughout most of Islam’s 1400 year history, Muslims who were any significant distance from Mecca had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. Thus it became established religious principle that what matters is intent. It is the mind of the believer that needs to face directly towards the Kaaba, and directly towards God. This principle applies in Mecca the same as anywhere else. All the great mosques of the ancient world point well away from Mecca Older mosques often point 10, 20, 30 or more degrees away from Mecca. The most famous mihrab in the world, the mihrab of the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain, points more than 45° off of Mecca: The Cordoba mihrab points south, while Mecca is east-southeast of Spain. In contrast, the Crescent of Embrace points a mere 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°, which is highly accurate by Islamic standards. The Muslim consultant who lied to the Park Service was a classmate of architect Paul Murdoch Who told the Park Service that a mihrab has to point exactly at Mecca to be legitimate? It was Nasser Rabbat, a professor of Islamic architecture at MIT and an expert in the history of mosque design. No one knows better than Professor Rabbat that mihrab orientation does NOT have to be exact. There is only one reason why Rabbat would lie to the Park Service about such a basic fact. He recognizes that the giant Mecca-oriented crescent at the heart of the Flight 93 memorial IS a legitimate mihrab, and he wants this al Qaeda sympathizing plot to succeed. A look at Rabbat’s background > shows that he was a classmate of Crescent of Embrace architect Paul Murdoch, both getting masters degrees in architecture from UCLA in 1984 and both doing their masters work on Middle Easter subjects. (Murdoch wrote a “masters project” titled: “A museum for Haifa, Israel.” Rabbat wrote a master thesis on house design in Cairo and Damascus.) This prior connection between Murdoch and Rabbat raises the possibility that Murdoch himself was able to orchestrate the Park Service investigation into warnings about his own design. By the same token, having the two classmates both show up in the Flight 93 memorial raises the possibility that Rabbat was Murdoch’s source of expertise on how to incorporate the full complement of typical mosque features into his Crescent design. (For the dozen typical mosque features, see Crescent of Embrace, chapter 5.) The Crescent of Embrace also includes an exact Mecca-orientation While exact orientation on Mecca is not a traditional requirement, modern mosque designers do generally employ now-available techniques for orienting their mihrabs more precisely on Mecca than was previously possible. Murdoch satisfies this modern norm (and provides hidden proof of intent) by including a true thematically-defined crescent that does point exactly at Mecca. Murdoch’s thematic explanation for his crescent design is that the circle was broken on 9/11 by the path of Flight 93. The terrorist-piloted airplane smashes our peaceful circle, turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent (that just happens to point to Mecca). The terrorist-memorializing implications of this theme are hardly less overt than the Islamic symbol shapes themselves. Nothing particularly subtle here folks. The symbolic breaking of the circle occurs at the upper crescent tip, where the fifty-foot tall, thousand-foot long Entry Portal Wall is parted by the Entry Portal Walkway, which follows the flight path through the wall: The section of wall to the right of the walkway in this image is symbolically “broken off” by the flight path. Remove this symbolically broken off part, and the remaining crescent structure points EXACTLY at Mecca, ± 0.1°: What symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11: a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. Rabbat knew about this too, since the original report that Rabbat was commenting on detailed both the slightly inexact Mecca-orientation of the full Crescent of Embrace, and the exact-Mecca-orientation that results when the symbolically broken-off parts are removed. Same for the Park Service. As the original recipient of Alec Rawls‘ report, the Park Service knew about both orientations. They also knew, because it was also in the original report, that a mihrab does NOT have to point exactly at Mecca. Yet they still publicly touted Rabbat’s claim that the crescent can’t be seen as a mihrab because it doesn’t point exactly at Mecca. A veritable web of self-conscious lies by Rabbat AND the Park Service. The design is called a broken circle now, but the circle is still broken in the same place as before (where the flight path crosses the upper crescent tip). The unbroken part of the circle, what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11, remains completely unchanged. It is stil l a giant-Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing exactly at Mecca. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url. 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Flight93 Terrorist Memorial

Moral Muslims don’t want a memorial to the terrorists on the Flight 93 crash site Thanks to Khalim Massoud, president of Muslims against Sharia–Islamic Reform Movement, for his press release in support of Tom Burnett Sr.’s efforts to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent atop his son’s grave. Islamic Reform Movement is clear eyed on the problem:

We all know who the enemy is. It’s Islamic radicals who are guided by the ideology of Islamic supremacy¹. Just as Nazis were guided by the ideology of Aryan supremacy. The only difference is that Gihadis consider it their religious duty to impose Islam all over the world and many of them yearn to die (and kill) for Allah. They use lines from the Koran such as “kill them [infidels] wherever you find them” or “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” as their guiding principles.²

Islam needs to be reformed so that it rejects supremacism and violent conquest, but trying reform Islam is a difficult and dangerous business³

:

Islamic radicals murder more Muslims than Christians, Jews, Hindus and everybody else combined. Gihadis may hate you for being infidels. But they really hate us for not following their demented dogma.

In this struggle for the soul of Islam, the last thing that moral Muslims⁴ want is any kind of victory for the supremacists, never mind a mind-boggling symbolic victory over the heroes of Flight 93:

What possible reason could be there for including anything Islamic or anything even resembling an Islamic symbol into Flight 93 Memorial? Inclusion of Islamic symbols memorializes murderers who brought down the plane and is tantamount to spitting in the faces of victims and their families. United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked in 2001. Let’s not allow hijacking of Flight 93 Memorial in 2008.

Muslims know all about facing Mecca for prayer One of the difficulties in getting people to understand the significance of the Mecca-orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is that it all seems so esoteric, and if it is esoteric, how important can it be? Witness Allahpundit, who as Michelle Malkin’s pointman on this issue ought to be one of our strongest allies. Instead, he dismi sses all concern about Islamic symbolism (effectively dismissing Michelle’s original concern about the giant crescent, which remains comp letely intact in the “broken circle” redesign), on the grounds that: “if you need a protractor to properly express your outrage, you’ve probably gone too far.” We don’t need a protractor to express our outrage. We need a protractor to explain what architect Paul Murdoch did. He built the world’s largest mihrab: the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. The planned memorial will be the world’s largest mosque by a factor of a hundred. The gigantic Sacred Mosque in Mecca would fit four times over inside Murdoch’s 3000 foot wide crescent, which is just the centerpiece of Murdoch’s mosque. Orientation on Mecca is THE central symbol of Islam, together with the crescent shape. Unlike Allahpundit, Khalim knows these things:

The shape of the “broken circle” resembles a crescent moon. So does the shape of the tower. Crescent moon is the most recognizable Islamic symbol. When we pray, we face Mecca and Mosques are traditionally built to face Mecca. The case could be made that the proposed design is aligned in North-Easterly direction, which corresponds with Qiblah, a direction to Mecca. Conventional wisdom would dictate that since Mecca is located to the South-East of Somerset, Qiblah cannot possibly have a North-Easterly direction. This assumption would be correct if you’re using a flat map. However, if you take a globe, place pins on locations of Somerset and Mecca, and connect those pins with a string, you’ll see that the string at the base of the Somerset pin points North-East. This symbolism may not be noticeable to a non-Muslim, and it is also possible, but likely improbable that the designer is ignorant of its significance. The proposed design would be perfect for EgyptAir 990 memorial. But for United 93 memorial, it is simply unacceptable.

Allahpundit is just being careless, but the willful blindness of the Park Service is foundational The Memorial Project is committed to the idea that Islam was also hijacked on 9/11. To them, blaming Islam would be as bad as blaming the hijacked passengers and crew. Thus the possibility of hostile Islamic intent cannot be contemplated, no matter how high the “coincidences” pile. According to Flight 93 Advisory Commission member Tim Baird, the Memorial Project participants all know that the Crescent of Embrace does in fact point almost exactly at Mecca (despite the Memorial Project’s many public denials). They just assume it has to be a coincidence, just as they assume it is a coincidence that the Sacred Ground Plaza sits almost exactly in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent-and-star flag. (Both of these almost-exact Islamic symbol shapes also contain exact Islamic symbol shapes. Remove the symbolically broken-off parts of the giant crescent and what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11 is a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca. In the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag is a separate upper section of Memorial Wall, centered on the centerline of the giant crescent, that will be inscribed with the 9/11 date.) Backers of the crescent design chose it specifically as a symbol of healing and outreach, implicitly to the Islamic world. Having been so generous to Islam, they just can’t believe that a hidden al Qaeda sympathizer could be so ungenerous as to take advantage of their outreach by sneaking a memorial to the terrorists past their noses. They just can’t believe that anyone could actually want to hijack Flight 93! This refusal to acknowledge evidence of hostile Islamic intent stabs at the heart of what Islamic reformers like Khalim are trying to accomplish. How to distinguish a moral Muslim from an Islamic supremacist Being knowledgeable about Islam, moral Muslims recognize (as bin Laden’s followers do) that Osama bin Laden is a perfectly orthodox Wahabbist, using traditional means of violence and deception to pursue the traditional Islamic objective of world domination. The difference is that moral Muslims⁴ reject the totalitarian methods and objectives of established Islam. Moral Muslims recognize that traditional Islamic orthodoxy needs to be reformed. Textually, the opportunities for reform are very propitious. The Koran contains both sweeping calls to violence (9.05, 9.29) , and sweeping calls for tolerance (2.256, 109). To turn these diverse commands into a religion of violent conquest⁵, every major school of Islamic interpretation, both Sunni and Shiite, considers the peaceful verses of the Koran to be expunged via the doctrine of “abrogation.” Where different verses can be seen to contradict each other, the doctrine of abrogation holds the earlier verses to be abrogated and replaced by the later verses. The peaceful verses are all early verses, so as far as traditional Islam is concerned, they don’t even exist, except as a device for deceiving infidels into believing that Islam is a “religion of peace.” This doctrine of abrogation flies in the face of the Koran’s own insistence that it contains no contradictions (4.82), and that nothing is abrogated (2.106)⁶. Textually, traditional Islam does not have a leg to stand on, but anyone who points it out is subject to the traditional Sharia death penalty for blasphemy. Alternatively, in a Wahabbist specialty called “taking takfir,” such heretical interpretations constitute apostasy, another death penalty crime in every major school of Islamic interpretation. The Koran repeats dozens of times over that those who forget the words of Moses will burn in Hell forever (e.g. 2.75, 3.187, 5.13, 13.25, 15.90, 16.63). This is repeated so many times because it is Muhammad’s accusation against the Jews: that they twist the “allegorical parts” of the Torah (3.07). But the LEAST allegorical part of the Torah is the Ten Commandments. Thus according to the Koran, the 6th Commandment–Thou shalt not murder–is binding on Muslims. Murder is any killing that is not in defense against either a violent attack or a conspiracy to violent attack, and there is no clearer case of murder than the traditional Islamic death penalty for apostates, who only want to go their own way. The same goes for blasphemy. To kill someone for challenging doctrine is MURDER. If the Koran really is the word of God, then every traditional Muslim in the entire world who supports established Sharia law is “wood for the fire.” Whether Islamic reformers are out to save the lives of those who would be murdered, or out to save the souls of the murderers, they are engaged in a great contest with perhaps the greatest evil the world has ever known: a RELIGION of evil. All they need to do to win is expose the truth: that traditional Islam⁷ is in systematic violation of the Koran’s own most fundamental commandments, yet to expose this truth they must break through the teeth of traditional Islam’s strength: its totalitarian repression of dissent. In short, all they have to do is bring truth to the most psychologically brutalized people in the history of the planet. What could be worse, in a battle like this, than to see the land of liberty–the great haven from which truth can be spoken–build a gigantic terrorist-memorial mosque on the Flight 93 crash site? No helping hand from the land of the free If this willful blindness prevails, it will be a clear signal that in the battle to wrest Islam from the grasp of evil, America will not help. By following the morally blind idea that goodwill to Islam means having a see-no-evil attitude toward Islam, America is refusing to witness what moral Muslims are trying to expose: that the worst evils–condemned to the fire many times over by the Koran itself–thrive at the heart of Islamic institutions. That evil heart is what throbs, a half-mile across, in the crescent memorial to Flight 93, and the refusal of our own Park Service, fully alert to all the facts, to witness this evil is the worst possible betrayal, not just of America, but of the good people in the Islamic world as well. A see-no-evil attitude towards Islam is NOT goodwill. It emboldens the worst in Islam at the expense of the best. To help the good against the bad, we have to distinguish the good from the bad. The good are those who are trying to reform Islam. The bad are those who pretend that traditional Islam orthodoxy is already peaceful, and deny that reform is necessary. Muslims against Sharia has a facebook group, if anyone wants to join. Check out the Islamic Reform Movement website here. To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.

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The text above the horizontal line originated at errortheory, without the superscripts, which I added. The superscripts are linked to my comments in the following enumerated list.

1. Islamic supremacy is intrinsic to Islam, established by the Qur’an: 9:33 and Sunna: Bukhari 4.52.65 . Offensive Jihad, genocide and terrorism are intrinsic sacraments of Islam: standard, off the shelf, Islam, not some imagined radicalism. The Banu Qurayzah knew who the enemy was: “Muhammad and his army“.
2. The Qur’an is given as a guide to mankind. In it, Allah issued clear commands, which are to be believed and implemented. 8:39 says “Fight them until…” ; 9:29 says:”Fight those who…until:. Why did Moe say “I have been ordered to fight the people till…”?
3. Islam can not be reformed because the Qur’an is Allah’s perfected word which can not be changed. Supremacism and conquest are intrinsic to Islam, permanent parts of it.
4. Oxymoron: “moral Muslims”. A moral man who adheres to Islam suffers from the most severe cognitive dissonance. He worships a blood thirsty demon as the Almighty Creator. Allah set making “great slaughter” as Moe’s price of admission to Paradise. He worships a genocidal war lord as the greatest and best of men.
5. No such conversion occurred. Moe’s preaching evolved as he accrued an army and gained strength. In Mekkah, vastly out numbered, he preached forbearance and tolerance. In Medina, after building an army, he preached conquest.
6. 2:106. Whatever a Verse (revelation) do We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, We bring a better one or similar to it. Know you not that Allâh is able to do all things? For confirmation, see The Meaning of Naskh. Surah At-Taubah, which contains the commands to fight Jews & Christians, was among the last to be revealed, it abrogates the earlier, more tolerant verses.
7. Traditional Islam is what Moe said, speaking for Allah, and what he did, in obedience to Allah’s word. Traditional Islam is authentic Islam, the real thing. The “reformers” seek to create a new religion and call it Islam.